What Came First: The Death Chicken or the Easter Egg?

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On Easter eggs and their significance to gaming.

By Daniel Clark

Both tomb and womblike, the egg is a neat symbol of Christ’s death and resurrection. But while the life-cycle of the average video game character would make a Hindu cow’s head spin, the term “Easter egg,” is derived from the tradition of sending kids out to forage for chocolatey goodness - the experience of encountering gaming’s eggs reminding us of a tradition based in the thrill of discovery. Games, though, are virtual treasure troves for explorers, so what makes Easter eggs special? Why do they exist? And why have they become such a beloved component of game design?

Let’s start with some history. The Atari 2600’s Adventure (1979), is a proto dungeon crawler that’s generally considered to contain gaming’s first Easter egg. After performing a specific set of actions, a room can be entered which contains the words, “Created by Warren Robinett”: two screen-high columns of blocky multicoloured text which stick out like a pair of gangrenous thumbs, such dissonance being one of the criteria we use to decide whether we’re dealing with a part of the game environment, or, as in the case of Robinett’s message, something else.

Where it all began...

I had a blast, recently, making just such a decision while playing Fallout 3. After finding a key to Grady’s Safe in Marigold Station, I anticipated the usual loot (guns, chems, caps ‘n ammo), only to discover Lug Nut’s ‘Naughty Nightwear,’ a pair of pyjamas which looks like a relic from a Hefner honeymoon. It certainly messed with my expectations, but given the Fallout series’ humour, I took it as a comic beat rather than an Easter egg, something which seemed to be confirmed, a moment later, by the presence of Lug Nut himself, a Raider with a tractor tyre pauldron and turquoise hair: it was a skit; the scum of the Earth being neurotically obsessed with some vintage leopard print PJs was a great example of the quirky laughs built into the game - though I couldn’t rule out the possibility I’d missed some residual egginess in Lugnut’s seductive apparel due to another more subtle trait of Easter eggs: the cultural reference; the allusion to something beyond the game world.

A crushed Terminator in Duke Nukem, for instance, is a nod to the fact that Duke’s likeness is based on the actor who played the relentless cyborg. (SchwarzenEGGer ... hmm.) Frostmourne, a sword integral to Warcraft lore, makes an appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine as a nod to another weapon forged in a land of ice and snow. And Gordon Freeman’s iconic crowbar pops up in Area 69 of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, because both Black Mesa of Half-Life and GTA’s Area 69 derive their inspiration from Area 51.

Freeman made crowbars sexy. Also the name Gordon.

Essentially, Easter eggs provide a fun way of pointing out the interrelatedness of cultural artefacts - the ways artists are inspired by, and pay homage to, others’ work; a practice springing from one of the defining concepts of the modern age: that blindingly new things are seldom if ever created; rather, any given game or song or scientific breakthrough is the product of a collaboration between individual inventiveness and the array of existing things which have served as inspiration.

That said, it’s really all in the wrist, so to speak, and at their worst this type of offhand nod can undermine a game’s atmosphere. The Pac-Man in Skyrim falls flat for me. And Guybrush Threepwood certainly never did anything to deserve being dragged into The Force Unleashed II.

Shouldn't he just be flinging insults?

For my money, the best references have something to say about their context, or gaming, or even culture in general. The prone corpse of Altair in The Witcher 2 is a great example, subtle enough to avoid looking completely out of place, but for anyone in the know, a hilarious diss of Assassin’s Creed, mocking the designers’ solution to the problem of tedious descents from vast heights: the swan dive into a tiny haystack. Similarly, playable Atari games within Black Ops II aren’t merely a bonus dose of fun, but show members of its core demographic what they might have been up to thirty years ago. And the Gungan frozen in carbonite in The Force Unleashed is a fitting symbol of fan sentiment towards a prominent member of his race.

Deploying Easter eggs with subversive intent is nothing new, however. Returning to Adventure for a moment, you might be curious as to why the infamous Robinett didn’t find the credits adequate to name him as creator. Well, according to the man himself, The First Egg was an act of retaliation to Atari’s policy of suppressing public recognition of its creative staff in an attempt to constrain their market worth, and therefore salaries.

Subversive isn’t necessarily to say aggrieved or spiteful, but oppositional: to the aesthetics, narrative style, gameplay conventions, you name it, of a given game. It’s not likely that Gears of War 3’s 10 foot golden fire-breathing death chicken was the product of creative honcho Cliff Bleszinski’s financial woes. Nonetheless, in a game whose aesthetics have been designed to create a distinctly coherent fantasy world, such an obvious interruption could be said to subvert the general creative effort. But to what end? With surprising candour, Bleszinski as much as admitted that it was a marketing gimmick inspired by the “donkey lady” glitch from Red Dead Redemption.

One of the more cynical rationales behind the inclusion of an Easter egg, no doubt, but at the end of the day, win-win. Surely the death chicken deserves its moment in the sun. In fact, let’s take stock of its symbolic complexity. For a start, it subverts the answer to the question of which came first. It makes reference to the chickens of Legend of Zelda games - an Überchicken to avenge those whose wings you’ve clipped. It’s golden, which pokes fun at the notion of achievement in gaming (a trophy that can barbecue you). It makes reference to the reptilian nature of the Locust, in that, as Sam Neill drummed into our young minds in Jurassic Park, ancient reptiles were the precursors to avian life. And it emerges from a pipe, which may as well be gaming’s official symbol.

Beneath such underpinnings, though, lies an even more fundamental reason for its success. In fact, the F.B.D.C. could have been anything as silly. The silliness is the point. Due to the size and scope of triple A series such as Red Dead and Gears of War, it can be difficult to summarise our enjoyment of them - everything seems too “tip of the iceberg”; inadequate to even mention. So, for the same reason someone might share their love of Beethoven’s Ninth by whistling the march used in A Clockwork Orange, Easter eggs can serve as symbols of the complex enjoyment we get from games. “You kill the golden chicken?” effectively means, “GoW 3 rocked, no?”

It’s not all fun and games, though. Occasionally eggs are laid with a far more scholarly intent. For instance, soon after its release, players of XBLA’s Trials HD, began to notice that for a game about precision trail bike riding in gloomy factories, the works of DaVinci, constellations, and binary coordinates didn’t exactly fit in. In fact, the sheer volume of these oddities invoked what I’d like to dub The Ilvessuo Law, after Antti Ilvessuo, Trials’ creator - Fin, game dev, renaissance man, wrestling heel, nuclear physicist, and general wit: if a significant number of dissonant in-game artefacts lacking in singular referential meaning are found, their meaning must be collective. In other words, they form a cipher.

And what a cipher this one proved to be! Even with a dedicated campaign harnessing the collaborative power of the internet, the symbols took over two and a half years to interpret, making it almost as tricky as the game, and demonstrating something else Easter eggs bring to gaming: new life; a resurgence of interest based in the discovery of a game within a game. For Trials completionists, the solution to the cipher was not only intriguing, but a final confirmation that they had absorbed everything the game had to offer - something that’s incredibly important to hardcore fans.

In fact, the desire to pick the bones of a favourite game clean has fuelled extraordinary attempts to find secret areas in Shadow of the Colossus, and is no doubt the reason people are still searching for Bigfoot in San Andreas, despite flat out denials from its designers that the creature exists. Which brings me to the final point I’d like to make about the significance of Easter eggs, and one which hearkens back to their Earthly origin as something hunted for; a prize. Easter eggs not only serve as an affirmation to the player that we’ve done everything and seen it all, from Yoshi on a rooftop to the Megg of love—they’re a symbol of the reasons we play games; the thing we’re searching for when we boot up a console or wrap our fingers around a racing wheel. In a medium which perpetually adds new measures of achievement, it’s nice to revisit the feeling of shifting a pot plant aside to find a cache of gleaming foil. For a perfect moment we don’t need anything more from the game. We’ve won.